Should robotic scholars of the future come to write books about the early history of the ethical systems implemented in their cognition, Programming Machine Ethics will feature prominently. The first generation of machine ethicists landed on the beach of the Robotic New World, viewed the lay of the land and debated how to hack a path through the mountainous jungle of the interior. Many flowers bloomed. Many withered. This book picks up a machete and blazes a trail into the interior that cuts deeper and broader than any other book yet on the market.

By machine ethics is meant the specific technical endeavour of programming ethics into machines (such as robots). This relates to but is distinct from broader ethical debates relating robots and automata such as whether or not “killer robots” should be banned and how society will cope with ubiquitous automation. This book is mostly about programming normative rules into robots and machines rather than deciding what those normative rules...